Weak

Rating: 5/10 (15 May 2007)

The Island was released to mixed reviews, the positive side of which was assuring us all that this was "grown-up Bay" - OK, maybe relative to his previous films, but if this were Bay's first outing, I doubt many would hail it as "grown-up" per se. The problem with these glowing, relative to expectations reviews is that this is the guy who brought as the Bad Boys series and Armageddon. The latter, Bay no doubt felt was as grown-up as grown-up can be.
So the film displays a pretty notable, though not necessarily bankable, cast of respected actors, the leads being Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson. The difficulty in assessing the quality of their performances lies in the construction of their characters. Only the real life version of McGregor's character is shown, whereas we only see Scarlett Johansson as the clone. My initial reaction was that her performance was less than stellar, awkward, silly, then it turns out she's playing a clone (we don't find out straight away) with the mental age somewhere in the early to mid teens, as is McGregor. In light of this, I was impressed by her performance. McGregor also, who was was amusingly playing a clone of a character who seemed to very sharply resemble, well, Ewan McGregor! Which is all very confusing, but essentially the only poor performance on show was that of Mr. Sean Bean, playing the man in charge of the clone facility, who was particularly stiff, which would've been less bothersome if he were merely a slimy businessman, toying with disposable life for the sake of keeping his clients happy, but his role is elevated to that of the God-complex control freak with some weird sense of paternal pride over the clones.
Steve Buscemi is decent playing some good ole' boy transposed from Bad Boys universe to this impersonal brave new world of the future. Djimon Hounsou plays a mercenary hired to track down the clones when they escape, who develops and or rather puts to use a dormant conscience and aids them against their masters, as this parallels his own plot-thickening back-story of slavery.
As you'd custom, much expensive-looking equipment are destroyed, and many a city street is laid to waste. The future LA looks much like present-day LA, 'cept more yellow and, after that bizarre futuristic cliché, more formal. We know that Bay means this to mirror a society where conformity has reached a heretofore unseen pinnacle, and we guess that Bay dislikes this superficially Utopian wasteland vision because he blows a lot of it up and the colours are so saturated to be sickening, but then he's done much the same in all his previous films, all set in the present day. I find it a little difficult to believe that Bay really despises this vision, when his films have displayed such superficiality and, to date, he has yet to render a single character that was anything more than an ugly caricature.
The best action scenes take place in the initial attempted break-out, when McGregor begins to learn the horrors of his situation. When things move outside, the action reaches ridiculousness almost surpassing any previous Bay movie, with the lead characters swinging off electrical letters on the sides of skyscrapers, and fall through a series of conveniently placed buffers. The tension after this is pretty much non-existent, as you can pretty much guess that the characters having undergone these sorts of trials will not be offed, and in particular we never suspect for a second that Bay will kill off Johansson when she's looking as perfect as she is.
All in all, a mildly distracting film mish-mashing any number of sci-fi films, most notably Logan's Run and Blade Runner, that touches on ethical issues of cloning and its potential uses, but the problem with this attempt at a humanist film is that Bay relies on bringing the issues to a kind of boiling point, so the message of man's natural desire to be free in spite of the luxuries promised in captivity is confused because the captive clones are given the option of death or freedom, not paradise or freedom, so we get no clear message to this end, and we are meant to be less sympathetic to the non-clone McGregor, with his natural instinct for survival at any cost. The line, to me, is not as clear as Bay paints it.